Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Blogging Tip of the Day: Vol. 22

Ok gang this is one you might want to take seriously and read the whole way through before you dismiss it off hand. When was the last time you put a picture of yourself in your blog? Now I am telling you this with the full faith and credit of a man who has been blogging for a decade now, and always has this card to pull out of the deck. A recent or a fun picture of YOU will draw people in, and you need to get over your phobias about it if that is what is keeping you from doing it.

I know ALL the reasons that someone does not put their picture in a blog, and I can debunk most of them. "Nobody wants to look at me," bullcrap everyone wants to look at you. "I don't like the way I look," and yes it translates to your readers as such, and they used to spend time wondering why, now they spend time on other blogs. "ISIS members will find me and cut my head off because I say things that they will hate," well ok this is probably one of those times you might want to NOT post a photo, but make sure you ARE on their hit list first otherwise you are just paranoid.

I recently realized this fact when I started posting my #SelfieSaturday pictures as blog postings. Initially I did it just to fill up space and look like I was furiously working on blogs, when in reality I was just being lazy. I figured "what the heck?" and rolled with it, and low and behold, they were very popular, if not amazingly uninformative. I should have figured this out because back in the day when I thought I had to be popular on Facebook, I would just post a new picture of myself and get 50 to 100 likes and then go back to being mediocre. Now that I have a form of rating system to my blogs I can keep the traffic popularity rankings with the simple picture updates along with whatever content I provide.

Now here is the real reason you needed to read all the way through, as this is one of my longer Blogging Tips, but I make it worth your while. Another secret that I have used for years as far as creating buzz with a picture is a phone app called "Photofunia" https://photofunia.com/ which will take boring pictures and make them fun and exciting. I have fooled a lot of people into thinking my Photoshop skills are better than they are, and made myself appear far more interesting than I am. I issue you a challenge to grab that app, and change your profile picture on G+ or whatever other social media you are using, and place another fun graphic in your blog. Then come back and thank me for getting you to do it.

I have been bouncing around online for just about 20 years, so I have been there and have done that. It doesn't mean I didn't like it and wouldn't do it again. As most humans, I am a social animal. To be a social animal on the internet it is social media that binds us all together. I prefer Google + and Twitter but have pages on the other ones that I ignore, so you probably should too.

My Blogging

I blog a lot. If you don't like people that blog a lot then I don't know how you got here to begin with. You may want to just move along.

Contrary to popular opinion I hate politics, but have political opinions ..

The easiest way to get under my skin is to apply the "all you talk about is politics" tag. This is a common knee jerk reaction some have when they see something political, and unfortunately I don't hold back sometimes. As a matter of fact, I share more about health, fitness and blogging than politics, which you would know if you weren't busy dismissing me. I actually follow and interact with more people that disagree with me than agree with me politically. The list of "other than politics" seems to be growing everyday and it probably looks a lot like this: